The stone lions outside New York public library are rather refined compared to the thick-set ones in Trafalgar Square. Their haunches stick up high and their faces have poise. They look as if at any moment they could spring off their pedestals and go for a stroll down Fifth Ave.
***************************************************
In the middle of the ice rink at Rockefeller Plaza was a plump woman wearing purple leggings and a tight-fitting orange sweater. She didn’t look like an ice skater. But there she was, gliding, twirling, slicing, so graceful in her element.
***************************************************
A fabulous poem from WS craft class, by Robinson Jeffers
Cremation
It nearly cancels my fear of death, my dearest said,
When I think of cremation. To rot in the earth
Is a loathsome end, but to roar up in flame – besides, I
am used to it.
I have flamed with love or fury so often in my life,
No wonder my body is tired, no wonder it is dying.
We had great joy of my body. Scatter the ashes.
***************************************************
I shouldn’t have poems about death on my mind at the moment though, as I’m four months pregnant. It’s funny how this is such a common experience but still such an utterly magical one. Things that I felt I was juggling and not focusing on before have in a bizarre way become easier, like everything has settled into a calmer place. Come mid-May that calm will of course be disrupted by small-hours baby cries but that’s ok. And while I say some things have become easier to get done, that’s not to say extreme absent-mindedness isn’t one of my side effects. The other day I found a dish-cloth that I’d left, for some reason, in the fridge door. And I keep wandering around our apartment looking for things I put down just a minute ago. I say “our apartment” – C and I moved to Astoria a couple of weeks ago having found after a couple of day’s hunting a rare thing: SPACE near the city that we can afford, just about.
I’ve had amusing moments like standing in the elevator at work with two other people, thinking to myself “little do you know there are actually four of us in here” (kind of). And speaking to a monosyllabic woman at the health insurance company in order to “authorize” my pregnancy. Wasn’t it a bit late for any kind of authorization? And who was the health company to be authorizing it or not? “Name?”, she asked, “Date of birth?”, “Place of delivery?” (as if talking about a Fedex package), then, “normal pregnancy?”, “normal birth?” (as if I could know that yet).
I've also had a bizarrely intense fascination with living things, especially in the early stages through a haze of queasiness. Like watching squirrels in Union Square, or flocks of tiny birds on the High Line. I intend not to overload Ewiny with yumsy-mumsy things though, instead just bring this new experience into the mix. Nor do I intend to post any sonogram images, which seems to be the new fad on Facebook.
C and I are wondering how many other Dominican-American-British kids there are. However many, there’s a high chance they’re in New York.
***************************************************
My other bit of life-changing news is that C and I are now engaged, after a highly romantic proposal in a little hut, by a lake, in Central Park surrounded by Autumn leaves.
Showing posts with label Fifth avenue. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Fifth avenue. Show all posts
Saturday, November 28, 2009
Friday, October 16, 2009
New York missive no 61 - Taking Amartya Sen's seat
New York is the man on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 50th Street saying his evening prayers on a little rug laid out by the food cart where he sells kebabs, a torrent of workers and shoppers passing him by.
*****************************************
At a discussion on human rights and detention last week at Columbia University with Sir Nigel Rodley, Scott Horton, Peter Rosenblum and others, David Fathi of Human Rights Watch began his talk with some statistics. In the US, 2.4 million people are in prison on a given day. That’s 762 people per 100,000. By comparison, in the UK 152 people per 100,000 are in prison, in Canada 116, and in Japan, 63.
During the questions I asked about the implications of the increasing privatization of the prison system. Rodley first emphasized that any level of privatization does not absolve the state of its responsibilities. Then he added that “all my instincts tell me that outsourcing of this fundamental role of government is to be avoided.”
Fathi concisely summarized the main problems with prison privatization. The profit-motive means private centers will always be looking for ways to minimize costs, including by reducing staff and training – hence it’s not surprising that a higher number of abuses take place in private than in state-run facilities. There is a serious lack of transparency around private prison firms – for example they are not usually subject to federal and state freedom of information legislation. And the “consumer choice” argument – that private systems improve standards because customers can reject products or services for better ones – doesn’t exactly apply to prisoners.
*************************************************
On a rather lighter, or at least more entertaining note than the detention discussion, I heard Pedro Almodóvar holding forth for a couple of hours last Saturday at the Lincoln Center. He was talking about his “history of cinema” with the New York Film Festival Director Richard Peña, interspersing the conversation with clips from his and his mentors’ films.
The audience was in fits of laughter half the time but cruelty did still crop up. “Legitimate cruelty is unfortunately part of our work” (as directors), he said. The first he clip he showed was from Cassavetes’ Opening Night, when Gena Rowlands, playing an actress called Myrtle, is blind-drunk before the curtain raises on the opening night of the play she’s starring in, Second Woman. She’s stumbling along the backstage corridors, collapsing from time to time on the floor. The camera sways and crashes with her. The play’s Director, acted by Ben Gazzara, walks slowly behind her, watching. He does not lift a finger to help and gets angry when another character tries to. That scene epitomized, Almodóvar said, the way in which directors, despite being “everything” to their actors – father, shrink, teacher, confidante, lover etc. – ultimately have to leave the actors to work through their challenges and problems alone. And I’ve worked with plenty of actresses whose problems are much bigger than their talent, he added.
**************************************************
That was quite a weekend of New York it’s-all-at-your-fingertips culture. The previous night L and I saw the Peruvian criollo / música negra singer Eva Ayllón at Queens Theater in the park (right out in Flushing, in the park next to the eerie huge steel globe donated by US Steel for the World Fair).
Ayllón’s compatriot, the singer Zambo Cavero, had died earlier that day and she was clearly emotionally distraught by it. Her singing was beautiful but at one point she staggered offstage leaving the cajón and guitar players to their own improvised devices until she remerged. She’s getting on in years and god knows how she held out through the second two-hour concert that was starting soon after ours ended.
The concert made me more excited than I already am about going back to Lima in December, ten years after I lived there. Seems I’m susceptible to falling in love with cities.
***************************************************
Well I never. I’m so often looking for adventure “elsewhere”, restlessly wondering what lies just round the corner, or in another part of town, or on the other side of the planet. And a miraculous adventure turns up right here, close to me as it can be. To be continued...
***************************************************
I embarrassed myself at the Carnegie Council the other day. Amartya Sen was giving a breakfast talk on his new book The Idea of Justice. I arrived a bit late, so the room was already full of people sitting at round white-clothed tables laden with orange juice and croissants, and Sen was in full flow. The woman who showed me in to the room whispered, “there’s one spare chair you can sit in, over there by the podium”. Right under Sen’s nose. I had no choice but to stride out through the room to the table next to him. Once there I spotted another vacant chair, less directly in front of him. So as subtly as possible I sat in it, started listening attentively, and attempted to ignore the (mostly elderly) disapproving faces staring at me.
Then I realized that I was sitting in Sen’s chair. Cheeky upstart with the guts to sit in the Nobel prize-winning economist’s seat, I could feel those faces thinking. Oh well, I was stuck. Luckily the event closed with a Q&A and Sen didn’t need to reclaim his seat. And at least I was in a good position to apologise to him afterwards – he was most gracious.
In his talk, Sen mentioned that the Idea of Justice draws on Adam Smith’s book the Theory of Moral Sentiments, written 17 years before Wealth of Nations and marking its 250th anniversary this year. Smith talked about the dangers that parochialism poses to justice. In other words the fact that confining discussion of a particular issue within a small society can lead to dangerous parochialism, and in turn, to injustice. Instead what is needed is scrutiny from a distance. Or to quote Smith, "The eyes of the rest of mankind must be invoked to understand whether a punishment appears equitable." This scrutiny said Sen, “may be useful for practices as different as the stoning of adulterous women in Taliban Afghanistan; selective abortion of female fetuses in China, Korea, and parts of India; and plentiful use of capital punishment in China, or for that matter the United States….”
He continued:
"It is important, however, to recognize that to listen to distant voices, which is part of Adam Smith’s exercise of invoking the 'impartial spectator' in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, does not require us to be respectful of every argument that may come from abroad. That would be absurd. We may reject a great many of the proposed arguments, sometimes even all of them, and yet there would remain particular cases of reasoning that could make us reconsider our own understandings and views linked with the experiences and conventions entrenched in a given country or culture.
The interdependence of reasoning is part of the ground on which Martin Luther King Jr. said in 'The Letter from Birmingham Jail' in April 1963: 'Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.'"
***************************************************
I’ve had a rarely, for me, un-exploratory week off work – a combination of working in cafés on my book proposal (so work of sorts) and pottering around the city. What bliss to be out and about in the city on weekdays. Especially in West Village, which can be heaving at the weekends yet is remarkably tranquil during the week. And elsewhere: on Wednesday I went up to the top North East corner of Central Park and walked down to Columbus Circle – the whole top section of the park was an oasis of calm.
The café-sitting has meant eavesdropping some interesting conversations. For example the guy this morning, talking on his phone: “How many bones do you get for that?...And how big are the bones? Two inches, three inches across? Ok, well get one of the big ones and one of the small ones. Oh ok. Well get a mixed bag of…ah, how much are those? How much? Nah…just get the bones…And like, a pumpkin to put them in.”
The pumpkin bit broke the spell somewhat…implying the whole thing had something to do with Halloween.
***************************************************
Just before and after paying avid attention to that conversation I was reading an opinion piece in the New York Times article on conceptual art, by Dennis Dutton of the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. It made a lot of sense, I thought. “Somewhere out there in collectorland is the unlucky guy who will be the last one holding the vacuum cleaner, and wondering why…” he said. The point being that conceptual art – Damien Hirst’s preserved sharks or his new medicine cabinets for example – depends “not on immediately recognizable skill, but on how the work is situated in today’s intellectual zeitgeist.” So it’s unlikely to withstand the test of time: future generations are unlikely to “get” it and if they do, it will no doubt seem rather dated, more a “historical curiosity” than a work of art.
*****************************************
At a discussion on human rights and detention last week at Columbia University with Sir Nigel Rodley, Scott Horton, Peter Rosenblum and others, David Fathi of Human Rights Watch began his talk with some statistics. In the US, 2.4 million people are in prison on a given day. That’s 762 people per 100,000. By comparison, in the UK 152 people per 100,000 are in prison, in Canada 116, and in Japan, 63.
During the questions I asked about the implications of the increasing privatization of the prison system. Rodley first emphasized that any level of privatization does not absolve the state of its responsibilities. Then he added that “all my instincts tell me that outsourcing of this fundamental role of government is to be avoided.”
Fathi concisely summarized the main problems with prison privatization. The profit-motive means private centers will always be looking for ways to minimize costs, including by reducing staff and training – hence it’s not surprising that a higher number of abuses take place in private than in state-run facilities. There is a serious lack of transparency around private prison firms – for example they are not usually subject to federal and state freedom of information legislation. And the “consumer choice” argument – that private systems improve standards because customers can reject products or services for better ones – doesn’t exactly apply to prisoners.
*************************************************
On a rather lighter, or at least more entertaining note than the detention discussion, I heard Pedro Almodóvar holding forth for a couple of hours last Saturday at the Lincoln Center. He was talking about his “history of cinema” with the New York Film Festival Director Richard Peña, interspersing the conversation with clips from his and his mentors’ films.
The audience was in fits of laughter half the time but cruelty did still crop up. “Legitimate cruelty is unfortunately part of our work” (as directors), he said. The first he clip he showed was from Cassavetes’ Opening Night, when Gena Rowlands, playing an actress called Myrtle, is blind-drunk before the curtain raises on the opening night of the play she’s starring in, Second Woman. She’s stumbling along the backstage corridors, collapsing from time to time on the floor. The camera sways and crashes with her. The play’s Director, acted by Ben Gazzara, walks slowly behind her, watching. He does not lift a finger to help and gets angry when another character tries to. That scene epitomized, Almodóvar said, the way in which directors, despite being “everything” to their actors – father, shrink, teacher, confidante, lover etc. – ultimately have to leave the actors to work through their challenges and problems alone. And I’ve worked with plenty of actresses whose problems are much bigger than their talent, he added.
**************************************************
That was quite a weekend of New York it’s-all-at-your-fingertips culture. The previous night L and I saw the Peruvian criollo / música negra singer Eva Ayllón at Queens Theater in the park (right out in Flushing, in the park next to the eerie huge steel globe donated by US Steel for the World Fair).
Ayllón’s compatriot, the singer Zambo Cavero, had died earlier that day and she was clearly emotionally distraught by it. Her singing was beautiful but at one point she staggered offstage leaving the cajón and guitar players to their own improvised devices until she remerged. She’s getting on in years and god knows how she held out through the second two-hour concert that was starting soon after ours ended.
The concert made me more excited than I already am about going back to Lima in December, ten years after I lived there. Seems I’m susceptible to falling in love with cities.
***************************************************
Well I never. I’m so often looking for adventure “elsewhere”, restlessly wondering what lies just round the corner, or in another part of town, or on the other side of the planet. And a miraculous adventure turns up right here, close to me as it can be. To be continued...
***************************************************
I embarrassed myself at the Carnegie Council the other day. Amartya Sen was giving a breakfast talk on his new book The Idea of Justice. I arrived a bit late, so the room was already full of people sitting at round white-clothed tables laden with orange juice and croissants, and Sen was in full flow. The woman who showed me in to the room whispered, “there’s one spare chair you can sit in, over there by the podium”. Right under Sen’s nose. I had no choice but to stride out through the room to the table next to him. Once there I spotted another vacant chair, less directly in front of him. So as subtly as possible I sat in it, started listening attentively, and attempted to ignore the (mostly elderly) disapproving faces staring at me.
Then I realized that I was sitting in Sen’s chair. Cheeky upstart with the guts to sit in the Nobel prize-winning economist’s seat, I could feel those faces thinking. Oh well, I was stuck. Luckily the event closed with a Q&A and Sen didn’t need to reclaim his seat. And at least I was in a good position to apologise to him afterwards – he was most gracious.
In his talk, Sen mentioned that the Idea of Justice draws on Adam Smith’s book the Theory of Moral Sentiments, written 17 years before Wealth of Nations and marking its 250th anniversary this year. Smith talked about the dangers that parochialism poses to justice. In other words the fact that confining discussion of a particular issue within a small society can lead to dangerous parochialism, and in turn, to injustice. Instead what is needed is scrutiny from a distance. Or to quote Smith, "The eyes of the rest of mankind must be invoked to understand whether a punishment appears equitable." This scrutiny said Sen, “may be useful for practices as different as the stoning of adulterous women in Taliban Afghanistan; selective abortion of female fetuses in China, Korea, and parts of India; and plentiful use of capital punishment in China, or for that matter the United States….”
He continued:
"It is important, however, to recognize that to listen to distant voices, which is part of Adam Smith’s exercise of invoking the 'impartial spectator' in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, does not require us to be respectful of every argument that may come from abroad. That would be absurd. We may reject a great many of the proposed arguments, sometimes even all of them, and yet there would remain particular cases of reasoning that could make us reconsider our own understandings and views linked with the experiences and conventions entrenched in a given country or culture.
The interdependence of reasoning is part of the ground on which Martin Luther King Jr. said in 'The Letter from Birmingham Jail' in April 1963: 'Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.'"
***************************************************
I’ve had a rarely, for me, un-exploratory week off work – a combination of working in cafés on my book proposal (so work of sorts) and pottering around the city. What bliss to be out and about in the city on weekdays. Especially in West Village, which can be heaving at the weekends yet is remarkably tranquil during the week. And elsewhere: on Wednesday I went up to the top North East corner of Central Park and walked down to Columbus Circle – the whole top section of the park was an oasis of calm.
The café-sitting has meant eavesdropping some interesting conversations. For example the guy this morning, talking on his phone: “How many bones do you get for that?...And how big are the bones? Two inches, three inches across? Ok, well get one of the big ones and one of the small ones. Oh ok. Well get a mixed bag of…ah, how much are those? How much? Nah…just get the bones…And like, a pumpkin to put them in.”
The pumpkin bit broke the spell somewhat…implying the whole thing had something to do with Halloween.
***************************************************
Just before and after paying avid attention to that conversation I was reading an opinion piece in the New York Times article on conceptual art, by Dennis Dutton of the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. It made a lot of sense, I thought. “Somewhere out there in collectorland is the unlucky guy who will be the last one holding the vacuum cleaner, and wondering why…” he said. The point being that conceptual art – Damien Hirst’s preserved sharks or his new medicine cabinets for example – depends “not on immediately recognizable skill, but on how the work is situated in today’s intellectual zeitgeist.” So it’s unlikely to withstand the test of time: future generations are unlikely to “get” it and if they do, it will no doubt seem rather dated, more a “historical curiosity” than a work of art.
Saturday, February 9, 2008
New York missive no 10 - Pigeon-feeding, super Tuesday, superbowl
“PIGEONS. DO NOT FEED THEM”. A sign by a patch of grass by fifth avenue around 56th street sums up one of the differences between here and London. In London that same message would have said something like, “Please do not feed the pigeons because of x, y and z. Thank you for your consideration." I leave it to you to decide which you prefer.
Last Sunday I went in search of greenery to Prospect Park in Brooklyn. A little like Hyde Park, it’s snaked by wide walkways that channel flows of weekend joggers, lycra-clad cyclists and horseriders (the latter not in lycra). There are little corners of wilderness too, rustling with busy squirrels. I was tossing up between continuing to an exploration of Greenwood Cemetery, or pacing through the park to Brooklyn Public Library at the northeast corner to hear a lecture by Patricia Williams on whether Obama will get the black vote in the Democratic primaries. I figured that the cemetery will always be there, and that it’s only once in a while that you have a moment of potential in American politics like this one. It was worth it, even just for seeing the impressive façade of the library: a towering stone doorway with gold embossed figures up either side. The lecture hall was only half full but there were still probably 200 people there – old, young, black, white, Asian. Patricia Williams is a Columbia academic and also a contributor to the Nation, and that academic-journalist combination came through in the way she was able to convey a thoughtfully constructed argument with conviction, humour and the creative use of words. If only all academics could communicate like that. I often think that the ideas of uncommunicative academics have an unfair start in life; they’re unlikely to progress far beyond university walls so have limited impact on changing things, even if they deserve to. Williams said she’s “almost 100%” behind Obama and planned to vote for him on “Super Tuesday” (two days later), but that at the same time she has enormous respect for Hillary. She’s infuriated by the way in which the media is trying to turn the contest into a battle between race and gender, and the way that Democrats themselves are in many ways seeing it as a battle, without listening to either side. She described her subway journey to the lecture, when a group of young Obama supporters had come through the carriage waving flags, wearing Obama hats, and calling out “Vote for Obama”. An elderly lady sitting the carriage had lifted her walking stick, "almost menacingly", and shouted “Vote for Hillary”.
A hip-hop fan sitting behind me asked if Obama has somehow skipped up and over a whole range of black issues, from the discrimination exposed by hurricane Katrina to the nascent exploitation revealed by the sub-prime mortgages debacle – and that his success so far as a black nominee can disguise the fact that the civil rights movement still has a long way to go. He’s not ignoring those issues, Williams said, but if he did confront them straight on at this point his rise would have been curbed well before now (which in itself says a lot), and that if he ever does make it to President he won’t be shy of addressing them. It’s true of course, that he’s a lot more than the “black” candidate. There was a strange moment when a woman said that her fear he will be assassinated is almost so strong that it would make her not vote for him. (What's politics all about then?!). The audience began to enter gingerly into a subject that’s partly taboo but partly unavoidable, feeling that by talking about the “if” they could be increasing its chances of becoming a “when”, but knowing that it has to be addressed. Would it provoke shock on the scale of 9/11 if it happened? What would it say about America to itself and the rest of the world? How would America move forward from there?
What I’m increasingly realising though, is that it’s dangerous to talk about America as a whole, as it feeds into its external power in a skewed way. It’s as a whole that America, the idea of America, seduces and will continue to seduce, yet it’s also as a whole that it threatens its own and others’ destruction. As always, reality and the way we try to understand it needs to be brought back down to the experience of individuals in its multiple forms, even when that doesn’t present the clear-cut answers we look for.
Well, “Super Tuesday”’s been and gone, and Hillary and Obama are still neck-and-neck. Watched the start of the results coming through at C’s apartment with a couple of others, eating chilli and chatting above the prattle of the pundits in the background as they tried to make news out of numbers before there was any news. Huckabee kept popping up being interviewed on all the channels as if he had nothing better to do.
Well it’s Super everything here at the moment. The evening of my Brooklyn day was the Superbowl: the New York Giants (underdogs) against the New England Patriots (who had won something record-breaking, like every game in the season). I watched with Ra in West Village pub, and having never seen a game before in my life went from being a complete novice to a screaming fan. The score stayed really low and close, though with a slight lead for the Giants, till 10 minutes before the end when the Patriots scored a touchdown – AGGHHH – and then, less than 2 minutes before the end, the Giants scored – HOOORAY! New York erupted in unanimous cheering, horn-honking and hugging. A novel first date, and a fun one. Which has confused me a bit, but I need to relax into the fact that it’s ok you can juggle encounters here to an extent. After all am making up for lost time.
The previous Friday had been to a party with Ch in a gorgeous apartment that had the effect of filling all the guests with envy and making them depressed about the deficiencies of their own abodes. The woman holding the party is an Australian who’s house-sitting the apartment for friends, which meant it’s full of all their furniture, paintings, books and the kind of global artefacts that say “well-travelled and cultured”. Given that, it was brave of her to throw a party, but then if I was living somewhere like that I’d want to show it off to everyone too. It’s on the fifth floor of an East Village walk-up. From the outside the building doesn’t look like much, but when you come into the flat you immediately feel welcome and at home. It’s one really long thin room, with a sloping roof, wooden floors and an exposed old brick wall. But the wow factor was the fireplace at the foot of the wrought-iron bed, which had a crackling log fire in it that captivated people with its light in the primitive way that real fires do (so rarely do we see them). The party was like two parties: we turned up at 10ish and the ratio of women to men was about 10:1. Ch and I then got into a long, catching-up conversation, then when we decided to go and get another drink, suddenly the ratio had flipped the other way round. Much more like it. I’m not that comfortable surrounded by hundreds of other single and semi-single women, who invariably are also not comfortable around hundreds of other single and semi-single women.
There’s a bit of a fun-serious swing going on with this blog. Last week went to a lecture by an Indian economist based at Columbia, A P. Columbia’s so omnimpresent in this city, or at least in the corners of this city that I’ve been hanging out in – there’s a lot more still to be explored that doesn't touch the university and that the university doesn’t touch. A. P. had a rather infuriating fixation with numbers (though understandable, given his profession). He viewed India’s growth in purely economic terms, arguing that along with that growth, the social divides and difficulties will gradually resolve themselves. Yet despite me not liking much of what he said, I couldn’t help liking him, as he conveyed his calculations with charm and a twinkle in his eye. I liked an analogy he made between India’s stagnant growth prior to the opening up of the economy in 1991, and cricket (what else?!). Just as you will never have the best cricket players if they only compete locally and nationally rather than internationally, you will never produce the best products unless you compete in the global marketplace. The problem with that argument though, is that marketplace competition is often for “cheapest” rather than “best”.
****************************************************************
Last Sunday I went in search of greenery to Prospect Park in Brooklyn. A little like Hyde Park, it’s snaked by wide walkways that channel flows of weekend joggers, lycra-clad cyclists and horseriders (the latter not in lycra). There are little corners of wilderness too, rustling with busy squirrels. I was tossing up between continuing to an exploration of Greenwood Cemetery, or pacing through the park to Brooklyn Public Library at the northeast corner to hear a lecture by Patricia Williams on whether Obama will get the black vote in the Democratic primaries. I figured that the cemetery will always be there, and that it’s only once in a while that you have a moment of potential in American politics like this one. It was worth it, even just for seeing the impressive façade of the library: a towering stone doorway with gold embossed figures up either side. The lecture hall was only half full but there were still probably 200 people there – old, young, black, white, Asian. Patricia Williams is a Columbia academic and also a contributor to the Nation, and that academic-journalist combination came through in the way she was able to convey a thoughtfully constructed argument with conviction, humour and the creative use of words. If only all academics could communicate like that. I often think that the ideas of uncommunicative academics have an unfair start in life; they’re unlikely to progress far beyond university walls so have limited impact on changing things, even if they deserve to. Williams said she’s “almost 100%” behind Obama and planned to vote for him on “Super Tuesday” (two days later), but that at the same time she has enormous respect for Hillary. She’s infuriated by the way in which the media is trying to turn the contest into a battle between race and gender, and the way that Democrats themselves are in many ways seeing it as a battle, without listening to either side. She described her subway journey to the lecture, when a group of young Obama supporters had come through the carriage waving flags, wearing Obama hats, and calling out “Vote for Obama”. An elderly lady sitting the carriage had lifted her walking stick, "almost menacingly", and shouted “Vote for Hillary”.
A hip-hop fan sitting behind me asked if Obama has somehow skipped up and over a whole range of black issues, from the discrimination exposed by hurricane Katrina to the nascent exploitation revealed by the sub-prime mortgages debacle – and that his success so far as a black nominee can disguise the fact that the civil rights movement still has a long way to go. He’s not ignoring those issues, Williams said, but if he did confront them straight on at this point his rise would have been curbed well before now (which in itself says a lot), and that if he ever does make it to President he won’t be shy of addressing them. It’s true of course, that he’s a lot more than the “black” candidate. There was a strange moment when a woman said that her fear he will be assassinated is almost so strong that it would make her not vote for him. (What's politics all about then?!). The audience began to enter gingerly into a subject that’s partly taboo but partly unavoidable, feeling that by talking about the “if” they could be increasing its chances of becoming a “when”, but knowing that it has to be addressed. Would it provoke shock on the scale of 9/11 if it happened? What would it say about America to itself and the rest of the world? How would America move forward from there?
What I’m increasingly realising though, is that it’s dangerous to talk about America as a whole, as it feeds into its external power in a skewed way. It’s as a whole that America, the idea of America, seduces and will continue to seduce, yet it’s also as a whole that it threatens its own and others’ destruction. As always, reality and the way we try to understand it needs to be brought back down to the experience of individuals in its multiple forms, even when that doesn’t present the clear-cut answers we look for.
Well, “Super Tuesday”’s been and gone, and Hillary and Obama are still neck-and-neck. Watched the start of the results coming through at C’s apartment with a couple of others, eating chilli and chatting above the prattle of the pundits in the background as they tried to make news out of numbers before there was any news. Huckabee kept popping up being interviewed on all the channels as if he had nothing better to do.
**********************************************************************
Well it’s Super everything here at the moment. The evening of my Brooklyn day was the Superbowl: the New York Giants (underdogs) against the New England Patriots (who had won something record-breaking, like every game in the season). I watched with Ra in West Village pub, and having never seen a game before in my life went from being a complete novice to a screaming fan. The score stayed really low and close, though with a slight lead for the Giants, till 10 minutes before the end when the Patriots scored a touchdown – AGGHHH – and then, less than 2 minutes before the end, the Giants scored – HOOORAY! New York erupted in unanimous cheering, horn-honking and hugging. A novel first date, and a fun one. Which has confused me a bit, but I need to relax into the fact that it’s ok you can juggle encounters here to an extent. After all am making up for lost time.
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The previous Friday had been to a party with Ch in a gorgeous apartment that had the effect of filling all the guests with envy and making them depressed about the deficiencies of their own abodes. The woman holding the party is an Australian who’s house-sitting the apartment for friends, which meant it’s full of all their furniture, paintings, books and the kind of global artefacts that say “well-travelled and cultured”. Given that, it was brave of her to throw a party, but then if I was living somewhere like that I’d want to show it off to everyone too. It’s on the fifth floor of an East Village walk-up. From the outside the building doesn’t look like much, but when you come into the flat you immediately feel welcome and at home. It’s one really long thin room, with a sloping roof, wooden floors and an exposed old brick wall. But the wow factor was the fireplace at the foot of the wrought-iron bed, which had a crackling log fire in it that captivated people with its light in the primitive way that real fires do (so rarely do we see them). The party was like two parties: we turned up at 10ish and the ratio of women to men was about 10:1. Ch and I then got into a long, catching-up conversation, then when we decided to go and get another drink, suddenly the ratio had flipped the other way round. Much more like it. I’m not that comfortable surrounded by hundreds of other single and semi-single women, who invariably are also not comfortable around hundreds of other single and semi-single women.
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There’s a bit of a fun-serious swing going on with this blog. Last week went to a lecture by an Indian economist based at Columbia, A P. Columbia’s so omnimpresent in this city, or at least in the corners of this city that I’ve been hanging out in – there’s a lot more still to be explored that doesn't touch the university and that the university doesn’t touch. A. P. had a rather infuriating fixation with numbers (though understandable, given his profession). He viewed India’s growth in purely economic terms, arguing that along with that growth, the social divides and difficulties will gradually resolve themselves. Yet despite me not liking much of what he said, I couldn’t help liking him, as he conveyed his calculations with charm and a twinkle in his eye. I liked an analogy he made between India’s stagnant growth prior to the opening up of the economy in 1991, and cricket (what else?!). Just as you will never have the best cricket players if they only compete locally and nationally rather than internationally, you will never produce the best products unless you compete in the global marketplace. The problem with that argument though, is that marketplace competition is often for “cheapest” rather than “best”.
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